The details of the sting, which Danny Sullivan lays out, are interesting. Google artificially assigned nonsense words to unrelated search results then, searched for the ‘fake’ results (on Google) using Internet Explorer repeatedly. What d’y’know? It wasn’t long before Microsoft Bing made the same nonsensical link! Several times. Oops.

An example. (Click to see more at SearchEngineLand.com)

But, for the p-p-p-paranoid, THIS is the bit that gets creepy …

Google thought Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was part of the equation. Somehow, IE users might have been sending back data of what they were doing on Google to Bing. In particular, Google told me it suspected either the Suggested Sites feature in IE or the Bing toolbar might be doing this.

…Do Internet Explorer users know that they might be helping Bing in the way Google alleges? Technically, yes — as best I can tell. Explicitly, absolutely not.
Internet Explorer makes clear (to those who bother to read its privacy policy) that by default, it’s going to capture some of your browsing data, unless you switch certain features off. It may also gather more data if you enable some features.

Yechh!

Check Google dashboard out some time — but at least you can! (click)

All I can say is, if I was a Microsoft Internet Explorer user (shudder) I would have turned that setting OFF. Unlike some people, I don’t even stay logged into Google or iGoogle or Gmail … nor do I value their offer to record my web history. (In fact, drop over to google.com/dashboard some time and take a wee looksie at what they already know about YOU.)

(1) pocket-link: Apple is watching you … Did you see they retracted/corrected the IMEI claim — NOT individual data.

UPDATE: (Nov 2007!!) After 24 hours of being online it’s still not been totally determined that the information being exchanged between you and Apple is anonymous. It seems to now be application identifiers, not an IMEI. Now all we know is that information is being exchanged and we are not sure exactly what.

I say that’s part of Apple’s effort to build a better (generic) user experience. Call me a fanboy.

I have most definitely enabled Find my iPhone so I can remotely lock my phone or wipe my data if the phone gets stolen. Hell yes. (And I’m not p-p-p-paranoid.)

—

As for Apple’s Safari web browser — well, I can see why you might say that. It has some issues. Can you suggest another Mac OS (or Windoze) browser that allows me to highlight/clip in rich text (i.e. retaining the styling) or Save/Print to PDF retaining WORKING hyperlinks embedded in the web page? Not being smart or argumentative — but those are two of the reasons I use Safari. And its speed, and AdBlock — but lately that’s ported from the Chrome version. Ha! Still, essential!

BTW I recently removed/disabled the Flash plugins and switched in a html5 extension that … so far is working really well. So, as John Gruber pointed out, things are WAY better without Flash … Like him, I kick over to Chrome (with embedded Flash Player) if I REALLY have to watch a flash movie.

I was part of the h.264 and html5 trial programmes at YouTube … (now that’s someone else who TRACKS users and what we look at … so does Amazon now that I think about it) and I think Flash is going to be a chapter in the history of the internet. Just my opinion. – P

This quote
” say that’s part of Apple’s effort to build a better (generic) user experience. Call me a fanboy. ”
is exactly what the likes of Disgracebook use as their defence.
I can post more Apple snooping articles they are not hard to find.

To answer your question if I want to save a Web page funnily enough I “Save Page as” but this is poss with all browsers no I don’t know a way to capture to PDF web pages. I will do some digging.
Sure, Safari will do things other browsers will not. But there are faster browsers out there and personally I just don’t like Safari.
HTML 5 will undoubtedly be the future Flash has had its day.
However it will be around for a long while yet. Example I often cringe when I access Flash Site on I phone and it will not work.
Those sites are not rushing to convert.

re telemetry back to Cupertino — hey, if it’s anonymous and app-based, who cares?

I remember a guy was found guilty of stabbing a prostitute in Fort Street a few years ago because he couldn’t adequately explain why, if he was at home minding his own business at the time of the offence, as he claimed, his cell-phone made a call using a cell-site in (ahem) Fort St just after the stabbing.

See, that’s personal data. And I’m OK with it.
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“no I don’t know a way to capture to PDF web pages.”

Built-in (i.e. standard) in the Print Dialog box on OSX. …

My point wasn’t that it’s possible to capture PDFs.,..that’s a given on a Mac … but that the PDFs generated through Safari retain the underlying formatting — the hyperlinks actually work from the PDFs. Same with rich text styling.

Highlight and copy text in Firefox/Mozilla and the text is copied to the clipboard as PLAIN TEXT.

Craig: your comment re Flash … “I often cringe when I access Flash Site on I phone and it will not work.”

Check this out on TUAW recently…

Flash-friendly Skyfire browser for iPad gets updated

by David Quilty TUAW on Feb 1st 2011 at 7:30PM

…. Because Apple’s iOS devices do not support Flash, the Skyfire browser provides a workaround which transcodes Flash video into HTML5 and thus enables iDevice owners to access most Flash-based websites and videos.

While Skyfire for iPad version 2.1.1 requires, well, an iPad running iOS 3.2 or later, iPhone and iPod touch users can download their own version for $2.99 from the App Store as well.

Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?

But no, this is Google claiming to be wronged by the reuse of the information it makes publicly available. The company that says it does no evil and loves freedom of ideas and sharing free and open source software.

This is the company that made its fortune on a business model stolen from Overture, that it later paid off in an out of court settlement with Yahoo. This is the company that appropriated Sun’s Java platform and changed just enough to avoid paying Sun to use its technology in the development of Android. The same firm that then turned Android into an iPhone workalike in order to turn its partnership with Apple into a predatory research session.

This is the company that indexes blogs, newspapers, and both digital and physical books, and then makes all this information available without consent in the contexts of its ads and paid search space, and is dismissal of anyone who objects to Google’s ultra liberal sense of copyright. It generated controversy by driving trucks around the world to take photos of everything, connecting to WiFi base stations as it went to suck up random data it could use.

Google copies every original idea it can find, like a massive information sponge, sucking up business models and innovative creations and forming its own duplicates, often with little success. In the last year, its most obvious advances were copies of Twitter… and the revised layout of Bing.

…

Google is the world’s largest information thief, steamrolling partners, content creators and competitors alike under its concept of the wheels of progress, justifying its dealings as being a free remix and expression of ideas. That’s all fine and good if you don’t complain about other people also taking the information you publicly offer without a license and then remixing it themselves.

Shame on Amit Singhai

Google’s complaints about Bing are so grossly hypocritical that the company needs to issue a public apology for being self-righteously hypocritical to the point of inducing nausea.